Daily Archives: February 20, 2020

Tucked away in an office on a quiet Los Angeles street, past hallways chockablock with miniature props and movie posters, is a cavernous motion-capture studio. And in that studio is the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1963, on the day Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech.

Or rather, it was inside that room that the visual-effects studio Digital Domain captured the expressions, movements and spirit of King, so that he could appear digitally in The March, a virtual reality experience that TIME has produced in partnership with the civil rights leaders estate. The experience, which is executiveproduced and narrated by actor Viola Davis, draws on more than a decade of research in machine learning and human anatomy to create a visually striking re-creation of the countrys National Mall circa 1963and of King himself.

When work on the project began more than three years ago, a big question needed answering. Was the existing technology capable of accomplishing the projects goalsnot just creating a stunningly realistic digital human, but doing so in a way that met the standards demanded by the subject matter? And Alton Glass, who co-created The March with TIMEs Mia Tramz, points out that another goal was just as key: the creation of what Glass calls a prosthetic memorysomething people can use to see a famous historic moment through a different perspective, to surround themselves with those who were willing to make sacrifices in the past for the sake of a more inclusive future. When you watch these stories, theyre more powerful, says Glass, because youre actually experiencing them instead of reading about them.

Back in the late 90s, when Digital Domain used motion-capture footage of stunt performers falling onto airbags to create Titanics harrowing scene of passengers jumping from the doomed ship, digitizing those stunts required covering each actors body with colorful tape and other markers for reference. To animate faces, an actors would be covered with anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of marker dots, used to map their features to a digital one. On the double, those points would be moved manually, frame by frame, to create expressions. That arduous task was essential to avoid falling into the so-called uncanny valley, a term referring to digital or robotic humans that look just wrong enough to be unsettling. The work has gotten easier over the yearsthe company turned to automation for help making the Avengers baddie Thanosbut remains far from simple.

Step Into History: Learn how to experience the 1963 March on Washington in virtual reality

Calling on the artists behind a fantastical being like Thanos might seem like an unusual choice for a project that needed to be closely matched to real history, but similar know-how is needed, says Peter Martin, CEO of the virtual- and experience-focused creative agency V.A.L.I.S. studio, which partnered with TIME and Digital Domain.

Re-creating the 1963 March on Washington would still stretch the bounds of that experience. For one thing, virtual reality raises its own obstacles. High-end VR headsets that fit over your face achieve their graphical quality via a wired connection to a pricey gaming computer. The March is presented in a museum with high-powered computers, but a wireless option is needed to allow users to more easily move around in that space. It took Digital Domains technology director Lance Van Nostrand months to create a system that would solve for wirelessness without compromising quality.

Motion capture actors perform for the virtual-reality experience The March on a soundstage at the Digital Domain studios in Los Angeles.

Dustin Bath

Considering the difficulties of traveling back in time to August 1963, Digital Domain sent a crew to the National Mall and used photogrammetrya method of extracting measurements and other data from photographsto digitally map the site of the march. Hours of research went into transforming that data into a vision of the mall from five decades ago, checking the period accuracy of every building, bus or streetlight set to be digitized. Activists who participated in the real march were consulted, as were historians, to help re-create the feeling of being there, and archived audio recordings from that day fleshed out the virtual environment.

And then there was the I Have a Dream speech. Generally, to control digital doppelgngers, an actor dons a motion-capture suit along with a head-mounted camera pointed at the face. Where hundreds of dots were once necessary to chart facial movements, todays real-time face tracking uses computer vision to map a persons facein this case, that of motivational speaker Stephon Ferguson, who regularly performs orations of Kings speeches. The digital re-creation of the civil rights leader requires of its audience the same thing Fergusons rendition does: a suspension of disbelief and an understanding that, while you may not be seeing the person whose words youre hearing, this is perhaps the closest youll ever get to the feeling of listening to King speak to you.

Even so, it took seven animators nearly three months to perfect Kings movements during the segment of his speech that is included in the experience, working with character modelers to capture his likeness as well as his mannerisms, including his facial tics and saccadesunconscious, involuntary eye movements.

You cannot have a rubbery Dr. King delivering this speech as though he was in Call of Duty, says The Marchs lead producer, Ari Palitz of V.A.L.I.S. It needed to look like Dr. King.

Digital life after death has raised ethical questions before, especially when figures have been used in ways that seemed out of keeping with their real inspirations. King isnt the first person to be digitally reanimated, and he wont be the last, so these questions will only become more common, says Jeremy Bailenson, founder of Stanfords Virtual Human Interaction Lab. What to do with ones digital footprint over time has got to be a part of the conversation about ones estate, he says. It is your estate; it is your digital legacy.

So for The March, though some creative license was takenthe timeline of the day is compressed, for exampleevery gesture King made had to be based on the truth. Only then would the result be, in its own way, true.

In Los Angeles last December, I put on the headset to see a partially completed version of the entire experience, including a one-on-one with the virtual King, represented as a solitary figure on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I gazed at his face in motion, and noticed a mole on his left cheek. It was inconspicuous, the black pinpoint accenting his face. I stepped forward.

When I approached the podium, I was met with a surpriseDr. King looking right at me. His eyes were piercing, his face a mixture of confidence, austerity and half a million polygons optimized for viewing in a VR headset. He appeared frozen in time, and I found myself without words. Meeting his gaze was more challenging than Id assumed it would be.

It was then I realized how my view of him had been, for my whole life, flattened. Id experienced his presence in two dimensions, on grainy film or via big-budget reenactments. How striking to see him, arms outstretched, voice booming in my ears, in three dimensions, all in living color. This is awesome, I eked out. He didnt hear me.

This image is created from a historically precise 3-D rendering of Martin Luther King Jr. from The March, a virtual reality experience

Portrait for TIME by Hank Willis Thomas and Digital Domain

This article is part of a special project about equality in America today. Read more about The March, TIMEs virtual reality re-creation of the 1963 March on Washington and sign up for TIMEs history newsletter for updates.

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Write to Patrick Lucas Austin at patrick.austin@time.com.

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How TIME Re-created the 1963 March on Washington in Virtual Reality - TIME

Max Maccarone and Oli Garner, content editors at training portalfindcourses.co.uk, discuss the uses of virtual reality when training medical professionals.

Technological innovation has quickly emerged as one of the most important and pressing topics for organisations of all sectors. While there are plenty of movements calling for the use of innovative technologies in training across industries in the UK, many healthcare professionals may be flying blind when it comes to VRs potential to innovate the medical training landscape.

The drive to integrate technology and training, however, is continuously growing. The2019 L&D Report from findcourses.com finds that companies with revenue growth are more than twice as likely to use innovative technologies like game-based learning and augmented reality in their L&D offering. More companies and institutions than ever appear to be ready to call upon innovative technologies like virtual reality to enhance the impact of their L&D programs and affect their employees innovative potential from the ground up.

No longer used exclusively to train in the military, aviation, and heavy industry sectors, companies are finding exciting new applications for virtual reality at a rapid pace. As the technology develops further, the limits of your own imagination become the only constraint.

Move forward with VR

As we settle into the new decade, the growing importance of technology for the healthcare industry in the UK cant be overstated. Its predicted that the UK digital healthcare market will reach $28.3 billion by 2025. The UK governments Long Term Plan in conjunction with the Accelerated Access Collaborative cements digital healthcare not as a trend, but as a new reality for medical training.

Director of employee experience at Bonobos Tiffany Poppa finds that when it comes to training: Focussing on strengths creates trust; it creates a safe space to try something and possibly fail, have a conversation about it, and move forward.

Technology is here to stay and clearing the innovation pathway for Virtual Reality has already begun. Training in healthcare requires giving medical professionals the tools they need to minimise potential risk factors in practice. With so much at stake, VR has the potential to give practising healthcare professionals the ability to feel safe in the training room in a realistic environment as possible.

A growing innovation

Innovations by companies like FundamentalVR illustrate the global and growing excitement surrounding VR in healthcare. The companys Fundamental Surgery Education platform recently finished a funding round with a post-money valuation of 11.3 million.

Tern CEO Al Sisto, one of Fundamental VRs main investors explained that:Changing the approach to learning and deploying new procedures and products in the world of healthcare is of critical importance for everyones future and FundamentalVR is leading the way.

Utilising VR as a training solution

By harnessing the technology of VR, medical trainers have an opportunity to complement existing training by allowing employees to do something thats relatively rare when it comes traditional learning avenues in the medical profession. VR essentially offers medical professionals the opportunity to rehearse and tailor new skills and knowledge in an extremely realistic environment without the associated risks.

According to Danny Belch, the chief strategy officer at STRIVR, VRs ability to allow employees to practice their learning in a safe environment is what makes it such a rich complement to D&I training.

Belch said: With VR, because of the on-demand nature, a real-life experience can be fired up with a click of a button.

You can now practice these situations. You can get a legitimate lifelike scenario with full end-to-end practice. Its not role play. Its alone and the stakes are free. You have this beautifully free space to practice, to stumble on your words.

The interactive nature of VR training transforms skills development into an impactful, risk-free training experience. In short, VR technology enhances conventional medical training because it provides an experiential mode of learning that simulates real-life medical practice, creating a safer environment for trainees to take lessons learned in training into their careers.

Room for growth

The possibilities are truly endless. Better understanding and willingness to implement this technology leads to faster, more sustainable business growth and room for future innovation. Regulatory bodies are already beginning to incorporate VR into legislation and risk-mitigation initiatives.

Embracing the innovations coming out of med-tech will continue to be a crucial ingredient for success, and VR offers an effective and increasingly accessible medium for achieving this. With every step taken to implement the latter, businesses amplify the potential benefits they stand to gain from developing a medical training program for trainees of any and all level.

Because of its versatility and proven effectiveness, virtual reality will continue to have a presence in the realm of professional training in general. Its accessibility to such a wide variety of healthcare professionals indicates that the applications for VR in the medical field can help training for every level, position and learning style in the field.

As VR technology continues to develop, learn how to effectively train employees to find opportunities to bring your new VR knowledge to your organisation yourself. Furthermore, through the normalisation of VR in the healthcare industry innovative companies will have an increased ability to illustrate VRs limitless potential to medical trainees across the healthcare sector.

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Virtual Reality: A new reality for learning and development training - Med-Tech Innovation

At Penn State, professor Alexander Klippel and instructional designer Amy Kuntz collaborated to build an entry-level course that aims to prepare students for their mixed-reality futures. The course, Immersive Technologies: Transforming Society Through Digital Innovation, or GEOG 107N, is open to students of all majors at the university.

Theres a universal need across the academic spectrum for understanding this technology and what it means for researchers to have this potential now available, says Klippel. We are able to teach people to create immersive experiences immersive content outside of a computer science department.

Penn State boasts several VR-equipped spaces, including the IMEX Lab, where students use VR headsets in the Pinwheel Theater while safely seated in swivel chairs, and the Dreamery, where headsets are tethered to computer units.

The universitys VR inventory also includes headsets with inside-out tracking, in which the camera is placed on the headset rather than on a fixed point in the environment to provide greater mobility. That means users can also work with VR environments outside the lab setting.

In designing the GEOG 107N course, Kuntz was careful to define clear goals and objectives that would serve to guide instructors integration of mixed reality technologies.

Good teaching is good teaching, whether youre using technology or not, she says. When were integrating these leading-edge technologies, we make sure there is real alignment to the objectives, to the course content, to the learning activities and to the assessment of the students.

Hoover agrees, seeing an incredible diversity ahead.

I think theres an application for almost every class, says Hoover, citing use cases for mass communications and exploratory writing. It definitely opens your eyes and enhances the learning experience.

With universities just beginning to explore VRs potential, Craig and Georgieva are excited to see what the future holds. While science and medical departments, in particular, have been early adopters, they are especially interested in use cases beyond those fields.

Were really going to see a profound impact when we start to integrate it into the humanities and social sciences, says Craig. There will be new ways to bring experience into the learning environment, and thats a significant shift in the paradigm.

When Digital Bodies first began presenting on VR at conferences in 2013, educators most common reaction was that the technology was compelling, but its application was way off in the future. Craig and Georgieva routinely countered that assumption, telling their colleagues that the future was coming faster than they thought.

Today, institutions like CSU, ULM and Penn State are proving them right.

With XR, were learning how to collaborate and connect with others in ways that will fundamentally transform our human experience, Georgieva says.

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Virtual Reality Advances Bring New Possibilities to Higher Education - EdTech Magazine: Focus on Higher Education

Tucked away in the National Museum of African American Culture and Historys collections is a white metal pinback button from the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At its center, an illustration of the United States Capitol hovers over blue text declaring, I was there.

Protestors attending the march sported this and other 25-cent buttons to raise awareness of racial inequality experienced by African Americans, as well as Congress longstanding failure to pass civil rights legislation.

[The buttons] were a way of putting on your own body your thoughts, your values, says William Pretzer, the museums senior curator for history. But in order for somebody else to know those values, they had to be up close to you physically. And sometimes you want to bring people up close to those objects.

Thanks to The March, an upcoming virtual reality exhibit centered on the 1963 protest, these buttons are set to take on a whole new meaning. Debuting February 28 at the DuSable Museum of African American History, a Smithsonian affiliate in Chicago, the interactive experience brings an array of close-up details to life, giving museumgoers the opportunity to join the narrative and say, I was there, too.

Created in collaboration with Time Studios, the ten-minute VR exhibit recreates Martin Luther King Jr.s iconic I Have a Dream speech. The March, which marks the first-ever virtual reality depiction of King, also allows visitors to walk alongside a crowd of more than 250,000 peaceful protestors gathered in the nations capital to hear the civil rights activist speak.

The goal with this project is to take an event in our history that is so famous and so often misunderstood, and put you in the middle of it, says Mia Tramz, co-creator of The March and Times editorial director of immersive experiences, to have you understand not just what it was, but the power of nonviolent protest and our right to assemble as Americans to make change in our country.

The March features around 25 to 30 minutes of education, immersive realism and reflection. First, visitors enter a sound bath spatial audio experience where they hear from the likes of Rosa Parks attorney Fred Gray; Freedom Rider Henry Hank James Thomas; and Reverend Gwendolyn Cook Webb, a participant in the Birmingham Childrens Crusade. Then, they are transported to the heart of the 1963 march, becoming a member of the crowd fighting for racial equality and a witness to one of the greatest speeches in United States history. Viola Davis, actress and executive producer of The March, serves as participants narrator, guiding them through the VR exhibit.

After exiting the virtual world, visitors can reflect on their experience by speaking with Joyce Ladner, an organizer and activist who attended the March on Washington, via an artificial intelligence interview portal. In total, says Tramz, Ladner recorded around eight hours worth of dialogue.

More than 200 people from seven different companies collaborated to virtually render the events of 1963, according to Tramz. Digital Domain, a visual effects and production company known for its work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Titanic and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, built the groundbreaking digital recreation of King and the surrounding scene. Using a custom-built wireless headset that renders King in real time, visitors will be able to walk around the famous activist and observe him up close as he gives his speech.

Animators spent nearly three months perfecting Kings likeness and mannerisms, reports Patrick Lucas Austin for Time.

You cannot have a rubbery Dr. King delivering this speech as though he was in Call of Duty, lead producer Ari Palitz tells Time. It needed to look like Dr. King.

Because the bulk of the virtual reality exhibit is centered on the crowds marching down Constitution Avenue and the National Mall, the team opted to individualize each scene. Rather than replicating a set of moments, says Tramz, Digital Domain scanned unique performances of 80 actors in hopes of achieving a sense of realism and historical accuracy.

One of these actors, 8-year-old LaVell Thompson, brought a personal connection to the project. His great-grandfather, 90-year-old Reverend Jeffrey Joseph, attended the 1963 march and stood about 50 feet from King during his speech. To pay tribute to this multigenerational experience, says Alton Glass, co-creator of The March and founder of GRX Immersive Labs, specialists captured footage of Thompson and Joseph walking down Constitution Avenue together.

Says Glass, [The exhibit] gives you an opportunity to bridge the gap between the youth and older people who have experienced the civil rights movement, and to have a deeper conversation about these experiences.

What makes The March truly groundbreaking is its array of authentic details. Time Studios pulled data from original photographs and drew on vintage clothing from the time period to create actors costumes. These detailed outfits, including dresses, suits and police uniforms, were then scanned into the game engine to simulate the attendees Sundays best, according to Glass.

Another crucial element of the exhibit is its audio components. The March will showcase a rare recording of Kings speech from the Motown Museums Detroit archives; the audio, taken from one of the master tapes recorded directly at the podium, is much clearer than the scratchy footage heard by the majority of the crowd. When participants are standing in the crowd, says Tramz, theyll hear the real voices of the men and women who attended the march, as captured in reporter Walter Nixons previously unreleased tapes.

Listen closely, and you may even hear cicadas hissinga specific detail brought to light by the new project.

As technology continues to evolve and push boundaries, museums are often among the first on the front lines. For Sara Snyder, chief of external affairs and digital strategies at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery, virtual reality has become an important tool for building the most memorable user experiences.

When youre in a virtual reality world you get to break the rules of time and space, says Snyder. For storytellers, this is an incredible platform that they have at their disposal now to be able to create experiences for visitors and for users.

Attracting the next generation of learners will push museums in new directions, according to Pretzer.

[A]s audience experiences change over time, he says, their expectations of a museum experience change over time.

Through virtual reality, the education industry faces a promising disruption: Younger audiences now have the opportunity to feel a deeper level of emotion and empathy than that sparked by distant words in a textbook.

I do think you will see a flowering of museum virtual reality projects in the future, says Snyder. In the beginning, its still very expensive to produce the 3-D world in a way that is realistic. But in the future, those costs will also go down and you'll see an increase and a flourishing in creativity in that space.

To Tramz, The March paves the way for a broader understanding of how to give meaning to historical movementsand their momentsthat become difficult to grasp as time passes.

Our hope is, as creators of this project, that you walk out of this experience, not only understanding the march and the civil rights movement in a different way, she says, but really understanding the shoulders that we stand on today, the work that was done that led to where were at currently.

The March is on view at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago from February 28 to November 2020.

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This Virtual Reality Exhibit Brings Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' Speech to Life - Smithsonian.com

The UK's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS, aka the Ministry of Fun) has barred Huawei gear from rural 5G trials.

The department is funding nine pilots to the tune of 35m which aim to spread the benefits of 5G to rural communities. These range from a virtual-reality Robin Hood (and his Merrie Men) for visitors to Sherwood Forest to remote monitoring of woodland and livestock, and technology to reduce water pollution.

But the DCMS said today: "None of the winning projects, or future projects from 5G Create, will use equipment from high risk vendors." 5G Create is a competition running till the end of June to find 5G applications to support TV and film production, gaming and other creative industries.

This seems to be at odds with advice from GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which calls for networks that rely on Huawei and other high-risk vendors (HRVs) to take a more measured approach. Current guidance is that less than 35 per cent of network access capacity, measured by traffic volume, should come from a HRV. Operators have three years to reach this target.

NCSC notes that use of HRV kit must balance two risks: the security risk of HRVs versus the need for diversity of supply.

GCHQ's cyber arm also recommended not using an HRV for any sensitive network or systems involved in critical infrastructure or to use more than one HRV on any network. It further called on telcos to include a minimum of two vendors on 4G and legacy networks probably of more interest to most people trying to use their mobile phone in rural areas.

Other projects announced today include money to upgrade coastal rescue services in Dorset, mobile health and social care applications in Worcestershire, and research by Ford to improve welding processes used in electric car production.

The Multi Operator Neutral Host Consortium, run by Telet, has bagged 2.3m. It uses low-power small cell technology to create shared networks in areas not considered financially viable by mobile operators. It uses unused spectrum accessed by Ofcom's Local Access licensing. Networks can be used by mobile providers as well as any other users like emergency services or utilities.

We've asked DCMS to explain how a virtual-reality Robin Hood represents a core network function and will update if we hear back from them.

Sponsored: Detecting cyber attacks as a small to medium business

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No Huawei gear in vital 5G project to bring virtual-reality Robin Hood to Sherwood Forest - The Register

The first Witcher game wasn't the greatest title in the series, but it certainly put a spotlight on Geralt of Rivia. While the game hasn't aged amazingly well, perhaps a new perspective is needed to re-spark people's interest.

That's where modder Patryk Loan has come in by announcing that he plans to re-create the entire first Witcher game in virtual reality. The new project's goal is to take the entire game developed by CD Projekt Red and allow players to experience it from the first-person perspective in virtual reality.

Loan, is currently re-building the game in Unreal Engine 4 and plans to have it compatible with a range of different virtual reality headsets. At the moment it supports, Oculus, HTC, and WMR. For players that want to jump into the action now, the game only lets you explore Kaer Morhen, but Loan is working on new maps and even adding a "fully playable plot, like a Prologue".

* Prices last scanned on 2/19/2020 at 10:25 pm CST - prices may not be accurate, click for latest

ABOUT THE AUTHOR - Jak Connor

Jaks love for technology and more specifically PC gaming began at 10 years old, it was the day his dad showed him how to play Age of Empires on a old Compaq PC. Ever since that day, Jak fell in love with games and the progression of the technology industry in all its forms. Instead of the typical FPS PC gamer, Jak enjoys the likes of a solid MMO, RPG, or a single-player linear story. More importantly, though, he holds a very special spot in his heart for RTS games.

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The Witcher is being re-created in Virtual Reality, playable right now - TweakTown

This article is part of our latest Learning special report. Were focusing on Generation Z, which is facing challenges from changing curriculums and new technology to financial aid gaps and homelessness.

MANCHESTER, N.H. Cruising to class in her driverless car, a student crams from notes projected on the inside of the windshield while she gestures with her hands to shape a 3-D holographic model of her architecture project.

It looks like science fiction, an impression reinforced by the fact that it is being demonstrated in virtual reality in an ultramodern space with overstuffed pillows for seats. But this scenario is based on technology already in development.

The setting is the Sandbox ColLABorative, the innovation arm of Southern New Hampshire University, on the fifth floor of a downtown building with panoramic views of the sprawling red brick mills that date from this citys 19th-century industrial heyday.

It is one of a small but growing number of places where experts are testing new ideas that will shape the future of a college education, using everything from blockchain networks to computer simulations to artificial intelligence, or A.I.

Theirs is not a future of falling enrollment, financial challenges and closing campuses. Its a brighter world in which students subscribe to rather than enroll in college, learn languages in virtual reality foreign streetscapes with avatars for conversation partners, have their questions answered day or night by A.I. teaching assistants and control their own digital transcripts that record every life achievement.

The possibilities for advances such as these are vast. The structure of higher education as it is still largely practiced in America is as old as those Manchester mills, based on a calendar that dates from a time when students had to go home to help with the harvest, and divided into academic disciplines on physical campuses for 18- to 24-year-olds.

Universities may be at the cutting edge of research into almost every other field, said Gordon Jones, founding dean of the Boise State University College of Innovation and Design. But when it comes to reconsidering the structure of their own, he said, theyve been very risk-averse.

Now, however, squeezed by the demands of employers and students especially the up and coming Generation Z and the need to attract new customers, some schools, such as Boise State and Southern New Hampshire University, are starting labs to come up with improvements to help people learn more effectively, match their skills with jobs and lower their costs.

One of these would transform the way students pay for higher education. Instead of enrolling, for example, they might subscribe to college; for a monthly fee, they could take whatever courses they want, when they want, with long-term access to advising and career help.

The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the places mulling a subscription model, said Richard DeMillo, director of its Center for 21st Century Universities. It would include access to a worldwide network of mentors and advisers and whatever someone needs to do to improve their professional situation or acquire a new skill or get feedback on how things are going.

Boise State is already piloting this concept. Its Passport to Education costs $425 a month for six credit hours or $525 for nine in either of two online bachelors degree programs. Thats 30 percent cheaper than the in-state, in-person tuition.

Paying by the month encourages students to move faster through their educations, and most are projected to graduate in 18 months, Mr. Jones said. The subscription model has attracted 47 students so far, he said, with another 94 in the application process.

However they pay for it, future students could find other drastic changes in the way their educations are delivered.

Georgia Tech has been experimenting with a virtual teaching assistant named Jill Watson, built on the Jeopardy-winning IBM Watson supercomputer platform. This A.I. answers questions in a discussion forum alongside human teaching assistants; students often cant distinguish among them, their professor says. More Jill Watsons could help students get over hurdles they encounter in large or online courses. The university is working next on developing virtual tutors, which it says could be viable in two to five years.

S.N.H.U., in a collaboration with the education company Pearson, is testing A.I. grading. Barnes & Noble Education already has an A.I. writing tool called bartleby write, named for the clerk in the Herman Melville short story, that corrects grammar, punctuation and spelling, searches for plagiarism and helps create citations.

At Arizona State University, A.I. is being used to watch for signs that A.S.U. Online students might be struggling, and to alert their academic advisers.

If we could catch early signals, we could go to them much earlier and say, Hey youre still in the window to pass, said Donna Kidwell, chief technology officer of the universitys digital teaching and learning lab, EdPlus.

Another harbinger of things to come sits on a hillside near the Hudson River in upstate New York, where an immersion lab with 15-foot walls and a 360-degree projection system transports Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute language students to China, virtually.

The students learn Mandarin Chinese by conversing with A.I. avatars that can recognize not only what they say but their gestures and expressions, all against a computer-generated backdrop of Chinese street markets, restaurants and other scenes.

Julian Wong, a mechanical engineering major in the first group of students to go through the program, thought it would be cheesy. In fact, he said, Its definitely more engaging, because youre actively involved with whats going on.

Students in the immersion lab mastered Mandarin about twice as fast as their counterparts in conventional classrooms, said Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer.

Dr. Jackson, a physicist, was not surprised. The students enrolling in college now grew up in a digital environment, she said. Why not use that to actually engage them?

Slightly less sophisticated simulations are being used in schools of education, where trainee teachers practice coping with simulated schoolchildren. Engineering students at the University of Michigan use an augmented-reality track to test autonomous vehicles in simulated traffic.

The way these kinds of learning get documented is also about to change. A race is underway to create a lifelong transcript.

Most academic transcripts omit work or military histories, internships, apprenticeships and other relevant experience. And course names such as Biology 301 or Business 102 reveal little about what students have actually learned.

The learner, the learning provider and the employer all are speaking different languages that dont interconnect, said Michelle Weise, chief innovation officer at the Strada Institute for the Future of Work.

A proposed solution: the interoperable learning record, or I.L.R. (proof that, even in the future, higher education will be rife with acronyms and jargon).

The I.L.R. would list the specific skills that people have learned customer service, say, or project management as opposed to which courses they passed and majors they declared. And it would include other life experiences they accumulated.

This digital trail would remain in the learners control to share with prospective employers and make it easier for a student to transfer academic credits earned at one institution to another.

American universities, colleges and work force training programs are now awarding at least 738,428 unique credentials, according to a September analysis by a nonprofit organization called Credential Engine, which has taken on the task of translating these into a standardized registry of skills.

Unlike transcripts, I.L.R.s could work in two directions. Not only could prospective employees use them to look for jobs requiring the skills they have; employers could comb through them to find prospective hires with the skills they need.

Were trying to live inside this whole preindustrial design and figure out how we interface with technology to take it further, said Ms. Kidwell of Arizona State. Everybody is wrangling with trying to figure out which of these experiments are really going to work.

This story was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Link:

How Technology is Changing the Future of Higher Education - The New York Times